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Anna Dempsey has been named the winner of the inaugural Hilary Mantel prize for fiction, taking home £7,500 for her unpublished novel This Is About an Alligator and Nothing Else.
The newly established award, launched to honour the legacy of the late Booker prize-winning novelist, aims to support unpublished and un-agented writers across the UK and Ireland.
Dempsey, a Florida-born writer and teacher who now lives in London, was selected from a field of 2,300 submissions. Uduak-Abasi Ekong, a Manchester-based Nigerian writer, was named runner-up for her novel, titled A Kind of Resurrection, receiving £2,500.
The prize was created after Mantel’s death in 2022 and is backed by her longtime agency, AM Heath. In addition to the cash awards, both writers will receive mentoring from an agent at AM Heath and an editor at John Murray. Dempsey has also been awarded a place on an Arvon Foundation residential writing course, while Ekong will attend an Arvon masterclass.
Bill Hamilton, Mantel’s agent, praised the breadth of the submissions, which were reviewed by a team of readers from AM Heath and John Murray. “The closer we got to a manageable number to recommend to the judges, the bigger the contrasts in the imagination and style and voices of the writers,” he said. “Settings from all around the world, everything from satire to the supernatural, from contemporary to ancient myth.”
Dempsey’s winning novel is a coming-of-age story set on the edge of the Florida Everglades, where a small town faces a water contamination crisis linked to corporate negligence. In the wake of her father’s sudden death, officially ruled a heart attack, the young protagonist grows increasingly convinced that the company is responsible.
“Winning the inaugural Hilary Mantel prize is an enormous honour,” said Dempsey. “I find it significant that this award celebrates Mantel’s legacy and that my novel, in its own way, is a tribute to my dad.” She began writing the book shortly after the sudden death of her father in 2020.
Ekong’s novel is a work of psychological horror drawing on West African folklore, in which supernatural elements are intertwined with emotional trauma.
The judging panel was chaired by the bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell and featured Mantel’s longtime editor Nicholas Pearson; the actor Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Mantel’s Wolf Hall series; and the novelists Chetna Maroo and Chigozie Obioma.
“Throughout her career, Hilary Mantel cared deeply for novelists making their first steps, and I feel sure she would have wanted to support these two exceptional writers,” said Pearson.
The prize is open biennially to unpublished and un-agented writers in the UK and Ireland, who submit an extract of 15,000 words.
